much madness is the eighteenth and final book in the Garth Ryland mystery series, which has taken him from the graves of Navoe Cemetery to the wilds of Mitchells Woods to the cave of Matatomah to the edge of Wamplers pit, and in and out of the arms of some of Oakallas most beautiful, intriguing, and dangerous women. Called an exemplary series hero by Publishers Weekly, Ryland lives and works in the small town of Oakalla, Wisconsin (Lake Woebegone made sinister), where passions run high and secrets go deep and nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.
When Larry Pug Hanson, former basketball star and current small-business owner, suddenly left town without a backward glance, all in Oakalla assumed it was to escape the cloud of scandal then hanging over him. But when his skeleton turns up in the root cellar of Rylands farm on a bright mid-March day ten years later, it raises the question of whether he ever left town at all. Ryland has gone to the farm in the hope that it might provide a suitable home for Abby Airhart and him, following their marriage in July. What he finds, along with Pug Hansons skeleton, is the realization that not only is the farm not suitable, but he doesn’t want to live there anyway. Hed rather live in town, exactly where he is now living, but not in the company of both Ruth, his longtime housekeeper and confidant, and Abby.
On his way home from the farm, Ryland picks up a tail that continues to shadow him in the days ahead with ever-increasing menace, as Ryland, with Abbys invaluable assistance, first has to identify Pugs skeleton and then determine who, if anyone, killed him and why. He does all this while at the same time trying not to arouse anyone’s suspicion into the nature of his investigation and while solving his own personal dilemma of where he and Abby are eventually going to live.
In this ever-deadly game of cat and mouse against an adversary who is as ruthless as he (or she) is unpredictable, Ryland again dives beneath the surface calm of his beloved Oakalla to reveal an underbelly of violence and deceit that swallows all who swim there, even, and especially, those innocents who put their lives and trust in the wrong hands. However, it is not misguided trust but obstinance that leads Ryland too much into the melee and to the brink of his own death.
